The Need for Approval

The need for approval controls most of what we do. It strongly influences how we relate to one another in the home, how we perform at work, our ability to socialize, and even our relationship with Christ. Politicians look to their "approval ratings" to determine how they govern and/or legislate. They run their races for office with one eye on the ratings. It governs what they say, how they behave, and the standards they portray.

There are three stages each of us goes through in our pursuit of approval.

1. PARENTAL APPROVAL. From the crib up through the childhood years, children look to their parents for approval. Their very fragile self-esteem soars or plummets based on the words or looks of approval or disapproval by the parent.

If a child doesn't get the approval he needs it will make a lifelong impact on him. Consequently, throughout life he will search for surrogate parents to give him the ongoing approval needed to feed his damaged self-esteem, the consequence of a parental failure to properly build self-esteem in the child.

Children are very fragile. Their need for approval and reassurance is enormous. Their self-esteem can be damaged by discipline that is too harshly or by the failure of the parent to discipline enough. The parents desire to correct deficiencies in them can actually damage them immeasurably if it is done at the wrong time or in the wrong manner.

Children should never be criticized for poor performance nor immediately corrected by their parents upon their failure to properly achieve something they have struggled hard to accomplish. They should encourage and reward the child with approval by listing points of success rather than areas of failure. The child punishes himself enough with feelings of failure without the parents confirming his. The words and attitudes of the parents should not reinforce his sense of failure. The time and way to offer correction is the next time they try that at which they failed at before or did not do as well as were expected. The correction offered should come in the form of positive instruction and admonition instead of negative correction.

2. PEER APPROVAL. The emphasis of the person changes in the teenage years. Although the need for parental approval never ceases, the major need of the teen is for peer approval.

When the child is well adjusted with a proper level of self-esteem, he will not be as subject to the need to have the approval of his peers. If the parents do their job well the child will be able to safely survive the very demanding stresses of being a teen.

Fads and "keeping up with his buddies" will not be so demanding when a teen is well adjusted. Instead of having the fear of being "different" by his perceived lack, his value system will sustain him. This will protect him from the "herd mentality" and other dysfunctional and damaging attitudes and behavior that lure insecure teens into their web.

Often the dysfunctional attitudes and behavior of teens are a heart-cry for the acceptance they felt deprived of as a child. The damage can be remedied when a parent will quit reacting against the teen's rebellious behavior and do what should have done in the years past. In ministering to adults, I quite often hear them complain that they could never please their parents. Mostly, the parents have done the best they knew. Unfortunately, they didn't understand the need of the child/teen consequently majoring on minors and minoring on majors. There are many things without which a person can survive in life, but without proper self-esteem they will be crippled throughout life or at least until they can begin to find who they really are and can properly endorsement themselves.

As parents, we need to remember that the child will continuously look to us throughout life, seeking for the approval they may have felt deprived of as a child. Even when parents are deceased, the adult will often manifest symptoms of childhood and behave as teens when faced with difficulty. This is because the very fundamental things they needed as children and teens were not provided.

3. SELF-APPROVAL. When one is confident in himself, he will be more likely to have an unshakable confidence in God. I'm aware that one sounds like the antithesis of the other but that is not necessarily so. There is a difference between that and having self-confidence to the exclusion of a confidence in God. People who have had the felt approval of one's parents will have had a more confident model of God that he can refer to.

When his parents have built his confidence and helped him to sustain it throughout the formative years of his life, he will have fewer problems with adjustment and human relationships than if that had not happened. When one has felt throughout childhood and his teen years an inability to please his parents, he will have struggled constantly with the need to please or appease a frowning parent or even one who voices his disapproval with pleasantness. Consequently, he will expect the same propensity from the Heavenly Father.

Self-approval is of tremendous importance for the proper adjustment of a person. When he has been reared without it he has a choice, to languish in the pits of insecurity or to do those things which give him the confidence and self esteem that he needs. How does one gain the right kind of approval?

1. The development of proper self-esteem begins with an understanding of which God says that he is. A person can take his own assessment of who he is as developed over the years or He can take God's.
2. He must release the frowning parents from all expectations that he has previously imposed on them and transfer those expectations to the Heavenly Father. Parents cannot help but fail the expectations placed on them whereas the Heavenly Father cannot fail to help those whose eyes are upon Him.
3. He must cease looking to others for affirmation but find that from his Heavenly Father and from within himself.

For the child/teen/adult it is time to put away childish things and to accept the Father for Whom He is and to accept himself, warts and all, for whom he is. Growth comes quickly for those who quit placing impossible burdens on themselves and others.

Jeff